The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [4]
The nurse seated on the edge of the fish pool, keeping a tight grip on baby Dottie’s gown, looked up at this but merely rolled her eyes with a martyred expression. Flesh and blood has its limits, her expression said clearly, and she resumed paddling a hand in the water, luring one of the big goldfish close so that Dottie could drop bits of bread to it.
John longed to be down there with them. It was a rare day for early April, and he felt the pulse of it in his blood, urging him to be outside, running barefoot through young grass. Running naked down into the water … The sun was high, flooding warm through the glass of the French windows, and he closed his eyes and turned his face up to it.
Siverly. The name floated in the darkness behind his eyes, pasted across the blank face of an imagined cartoon major, drawn in uniform, an outsize sword brandished in his hand and bags of money stuffed into the back of his breeches, obscene bulges under the skirt of his coat. One or two had fallen to the ground, bursting open so that you could see the contents—coin in one, the other filled with what looked like poppets, small wooden doll-like things. Each one with a tiny knife through its heart.
Hal swore in German behind him. He must have reached the part about the rifles; German oaths were reserved for the most stringent occasions, French being used for minor things like a burnt dinner, and Latin for formal insults committed to paper. Minnie wouldn’t let either Hal or John swear in English in the house, not wanting the boys to acquire low habits. John could have told her it was too late for such caution but didn’t.
He turned round to see Hal on his feet, pale with rage, a sheet of paper crumpled in one hand.
“How dare he? How dare he?”
A small knot he hadn’t known was there dissolved under John’s ribs. His brother had built his own regiment, the 46th, out of his own blood and bones; no one was less likely to overlook or condone military malfeasance. Still, Hal’s response reassured him.
“You believe Carruthers, then?”
Hal glared at him.
“Don’t you? You knew the man.”
He had known Charles Carruthers—in more than one sense.
“Yes, I believed him when he told me about Siverly in Canada, and that”—he nodded at the papers, thrown in a sprawl across Hal’s desk—“is even more convincing. You’d think he’d been a lawyer.”
He could still see Carruthers’s face, pale in the dimness of his attic room in the little garrison town of Gareon, drawn with ill health but set with grim determination to live long enough to see justice done. Charlie hadn’t lived that long, but long enough to write down every detail of the case against Major Gerald Siverly and to entrust it to Grey.
He was the fuse that would detonate this particular bomb. And he was all too familiar with what happened to fuses, once lit.
“WHAT IS THIS?” Hal was frowning at one of the papers. Grey put down the book in his hand and came to look. The paper was in Carruthers’s handwriting, as painstakingly executed as the rest; Carruthers had known he was setting down evidence for a court-martial and had done his best to make it legible.
It was legible—insofar as Grey could make out the various letters that composed the words. But the words themselves looked like nothing he had ever seen before.
Éistigí, Fir na dtrí náisiún.
Éistigí, le glór na hadhairc ag caoineadh san goath.
Ag teácht as an oiche.
Tá sí ag teacht.
Tá an Banrion ag teacht.
Sé na deonaigh, le gruaig agus súil in bhfiainne,
Ag leanúint lucht mhóir an Bhanríon.
It looked like the sheerest gibberish. At the same time, there was something … civilized—was that the word?—in its appearance. The words bore all manner of strange accents and looked like no language with which Grey was familiar, and yet the text was punctuated in what seemed a logical fashion. It was laid out upon the page in the style of verse, with evident stanzas and what certainly looked